Today there are many uses for a stealth weapon, i.e. a weapon normally hidden from view in an enclosure of a type not normally having a weapon, such as the back of a sport utility vehicle or a (covered) cab (back-end) of a pickup truck type vehicle. Such uses include e.g. some homeland defense missions, VIP (very important person) escort, reconnaissance, security patrol, and transport of special cargo (such as nuclear material), or any mission in which it is advantageous to avoid drawing attention to the mission but is important to have the ability to respond to a threat to the mission.
In response to the demand for stealth weapons, the prior art teaches providing a weapon system cage enclosed in the back of one or another of various types of commercial civilian vehicles (such as a sport utility vehicle or a cab of a pickup type truck) and including a weapon (such as a 50-caliber—i.e. a 12.7 mm or 0.50″ caliber—machine gun) on a lift platform, the lift platform for raising and lowering the weapon through an opening in the ceiling of the vehicle, with the opening normally covered by a retractable roof. The operation of the lift platform, retractable roof, and the weapon itself is controlled from an operator control station in typically the front passenger seat (the “shotgun” seat, as in “riding shotgun”).
In respect to the retractable roof, the prior art teaches a cloth roof able to be rolled up when retracted. The roof is raised and retracted by an electric motor. Such a roof is of course of light weight, and electric motors with sufficient power and torque to raise and lower such a roof in a reasonably short time, as required by a stealth mission, are readily available.
The prior art in respect to a cloth retractable roof has one major problem. A cloth roof can be easily cut with a knife. It would therefore be advantageous to replace a cloth retractable roof with a hard roof. Such roofs do exist for use on commercial trucks; they are used to cover the beds of pickup truck type vehicles. Hard bendable roofs suitable for such use are available from Pace Edwards, and are provided as interconnected slats allowing the roofs to be rolled up when retracted. Adjacent slats are flexibly interconnected by a strip of rubber having bulbous edges inserted in recesses in adjacent slats. The slats are so formed as to be able to bend or fold toward each other (typically in only one direction, with the result that the roof can be rolled up only always with one side or face of the roof on the inside in the rolled-up configuration). The roof is raised and retracted by an electric motor having a drive gear coupled via timing belts and a shaft to timing gears that turn sprockets that grip the roof so as to allow raising and lowering the roof.
Using such a retractable hard roof for a stealth application poses two problems. First, because the roof must be raised and retracted quickly (so as to have a travel rate of typically at least several inches per second), adjacent slats sometimes pull apart because the rubber strip holding them together, which must be reasonably soft to allow the roof to bend, are so soft as to deform under the forces applied to raise and retract the roof quickly, and when deformed, the rubber strips pull free of the recesses in the slats, so the door splits apart. Also, again as a result of the speed with which the roof must be moved, and also owing to the play and separation between the slats on account of the soft rubber strips holding the slats together, even if equal forces are applied in perfect synchrony at both edges of the roof, the roof sometimes binds at least momentarily while being moved. To use such a roof in a stealth application requires therefore a way of improving the stability of the roof structure in respect to the above deficiencies, without diminishing the flexibility needed for retracting the roof into a rolled-up configuration.
Another problem with the prior art—this time generally in respect to the roof but more specifically in respect to the motor used to raise and lower/retract the roof—is that to raise the roof (typically 35 pounds, as noted above) quickly (typically on the order of 300 inches per minute) requires something on the order of 1 horsepower turning at 200 rpm. An electric motor (D.C. or even A.C.) meeting such specifications tends to be expensive (because of typically having to turn at a higher speed and then gearing down to the 200 rpm to provide the required horsepower). In addition, an electric motor will overheat sooner in a high-temperature environment, and many stealth missions are carried out in such an environment, such as in deserts of the Middle East, where the ambient can be 54 degrees Centigrade. What is therefore also needed is a low cost, durable motor, relatively insensitive to high temperature, for raising and retracting a relatively heavy (30 to 40-pound) hard roof.
In respect to encapsulating the weapon in an enclosure, what the prior art teaches is embedding the stealth weapon in a vehicle, i.e. building a stealth weapon into the vehicle so as to incorporate the weapon as part of the vehicle. The stealth weapon is of course used rarely, if at all, and so the vehicle quite expensive) stealth weapon. So it would be advantageous to have a stealth weapon with at least the weapon itself (as opposed to the operator control station) and the machine for raising and lowering the weapon packaged so as to be moveable, essentially intact, from one vehicle to another, or more generally to be transportable intact from one application/location to another.